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Apple has made it pretty easy to start writing iOS apps. Of course, Step One is â€śBuy a Mac.â€ť Easy! Then just download the free Xcode Installer from the Mac App Store, and start writing code when itâ€™s done.

Android is a bit more involved. You can download the SDK easily, but to actually start writing code, youâ€™ll want to setup Eclipse and install Googleâ€™s ADT Plugin.

"Apple makes it so easy! Just spend $2,000 on a new computer and you're good to go after you download some free software! But Android is so hard because you have to download three separate free software packages. Boo hoo! Why does it have to be so hard to program for Android?"

Apple has made it pretty easy to start writing iOS apps. Of course, Step One is â€śBuy a Mac.â€ť Easy! Then just download the free Xcode Installer from the Mac App Store, and start writing code when itâ€™s done.

Android is a bit more involved. You can download the SDK easily, but to actually start writing code, youâ€™ll want to setup Eclipse and install Googleâ€™s ADT Plugin.

"Apple makes it so easy! Just spend $2,000 on a new computer and you're good to go after you download some free software! But Android is so hard because you have to download three separate free software packages. Boo hoo! Why does it have to be so hard to program for Android?"

Hahahaha~!

+1

I liked this:

Quote

Eclipse is a world unto itself. Itâ€™s the IDE to end IDEs. Consequently, it has many abstract-sounding concepts youâ€™ll have to learn. There are Workspaces, and Perspectives, and Run Configurations. And Eclipse itself is just an empty shell of sorts; all non-trivial functionality is provided via a complex network of interdependent Plugins, similar to Linux distributions. Come to think of itâ€¦

Of course, IDE weirdness isnâ€™t unique to Eclipse; Xcode was pretty damn weird at first too, and itâ€™s getting more meta with each release (Schemes, anyone?).

I'm no Eclipse fan. It's simply clunky to use. But man... I'd rather use Eclipse than Xcode. Weird? That's an understatement. There's 1 way to do things in Xcode and only 1 way. i.e. DO NOT think different.

Great thread that reveals a little bit of the history of Android except I don't really understand what Meridian is.

I read the link but the author talks about it being a platform. Wouldn't a port then lead to future compatibility problems much in the same way greasemonkey scripts keeps getting broken everytime a site updates?(Unless the author is also the maker of Meridian in which I take this comment back.)

Logged

<reserve space for the day DC can auto-generate your signature from your personal PopUp Wisdom quotes>

In the end the article turns out being a big praise for the Android platform and Eclipse, and that if Andoid would have been around a bit earlier, he may have never written an iPhone version of Meridian, though he eventually would have, and moaned in the same way about the Apple 'experience', as all his complaints are those of anyone that hasn't ever before used Java, Eclipse and an Android Phone.

@Paul Keith: Yes, he's directly involved in developing Meridian, he even states in the first paragraph:

Quote

Recently, we released the Android version of Meridian, our platform for building location-based apps.